Student Teaching - Essay Example

An intensive reading intervention strategy involving decoding and fluency skills and based on the Phono-Graphix and Read Naturally program was applied to 27 students (Denton, 2006). A 16-week intervention “resulted in significant improvement in reading, decoding, fluency, and comprehension” (ibid). Students with special needs also respond well to reading interventions. The effectiveness of a supplemental tutoring intervention by the name of Read Well was evaluated on children with learning disabilities, attention-deficit disorder, and English language learners who were also poor readers in a several multiple-probe-across-participants design (Jitendra, 2004).

These children “showed improvement in passage fluency” (ibid) in Year 1 studies and “growth in reading, spelling, and comprehension for most children” (ibid) in Year 2 studies. Overall, both studies indicated “benefits of increased instructional intensity and duration for children who struggle with emerging reading skills” (ibid). Students with different primary language backgrounds also respond equally well as a study of 166 struggling readers who underwent phonologically based remediation showed (Lovett, 2008).

They either had a reading disability, or were below average in oral or verbal skills besides having English either as a first language (EFL) or had an English language learner (ELL) status. After being randomly assigned to either a special education reading control program or one of three reading interventions, “the research based interventions proved superior to the special education control on both reading outcomes and rate of growth” (ibid). Moreover, there were no differences between children with EFL and ELL status.

Thus, intervention is successful but student’s reading difficulties can have varying causes for which an individually tailored instructional strategy can help to better respond to the unique challenges of